GT: Innovating Here and Now

Well, for all of you who missed this, the Georgia Tech Alumni Association put on a very interesting talk last night.

Three quite distinguished faculty presented some exciting work that is going on at Tech. The first, Dr. Roger Webb (ECE), discussed the Strategic Energy Initiative in which Tech is working to try to help out on the energy crisis. 2 key things, a feasability study with Georgia Southern using a wind farm off the coast of Savanah, and experimentation with using soft wood pulp to generate ethanol. These will certainly not solve the issue, but could help ease the problems on both the electricity and the vehicle fuel issues.

The second presentation was by Dr. David Parekh, Deputy Director of GTRI. GTRI now has over 1,200 folk with about a $140 million annual budget. He spent some time on two fascinating developments.

The first you may have caught in the news, the Ultra AP (Armored Patrol) vehicle which was featured in many publications including Fortune and Rolling Stone among others. A couple of innovative features of the vehicle:

1. Built on COTS parts as much as possible starting with an F-350 chassis.
2. Introduces the 'blast bucket' which is built to protect the people, not the vehicle. They consulted with NASCAR folk to learn what safety features they had developed and added some new things as well.
3. 360-degree seating. The passengers sit around the center facing out -- giving visibility and protection on all sides of the vehicle. It also ends up being better for communications as the heads of the people are closer together.
4. Lighter weight armor. Some compound they built which is much lighter than the steel armor currently employed saves weight and thus the vehicles can actually get decent fuel efficiency.
5. From initial 'napkin' drawing to prototype vehicle in 1 year.
   

There are other features, but these stood out. Ultimately, all of these are meant to save lives, which seems to me like a very fine cause.

The second GTRI development is the creation of an International Applied Research Institute in Ireleand. This new development will focus on 4 key things:

1. IPTV
2. RFID
3. Biotechnology
4. Sustainable Energy

I hadn't realized, but per capita, Ireland is now the 2nd richest country in the EU. That's quite a dramatic change in a relatively short amount of time. Good stuff...

The last speaker was Dr. Don P. Giddens, Dean of the College of Engineering. He focused on the collaboration with Emory in the Winship Cancer Institute. Fascinating work on engineering chemicals and delivery agents to attack cancer cells while leaving the rest of the body in good health. Quantum dots, docking molecules, all sorts of whacky things going on. They have very good funding and are currently working on getting designated as a Comprehensive Cancer Center of which there are fewer than 50 in the states and none currently in Georgia.

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It's clear that Tech is making lots of progress locally, nationally, and internationally as the interdisciplinary collaborations and activities seem to be reaching a fevered pitch. Exciting stuff to be associated with, and research that is working on some problems that will have huge impacts worldwide.